David Edwards

So don't ask yourself what people want. Ask instead, What is true? What really inspires me, excites me? What will really help people and take away their confusion and suffering? It's sort of a funny, crazy way to go, but I think it's the only way to bring water to the wasteland Joseph Campbell described. When I read something truthful, something real, I breathe a deep sigh and say, "Fantastic - I wasn't mad or alone in thinking that, after all!" So often we are left to our own devices, struggling in the dark with this external and internal propaganda system. At that point, for someone to tell us the truth is a gift. In a world where people all around us are lying and confusing us, to be honest is a great kindness.

I can only find answers, you can only find answers, the world can only find answers, when you and I as individuals escape the pacified herd, escape the system of control around us and in our heads and recognize the two voices shouting louder even than the massed might of propaganda - the voices inside our desolated hearts and outside in the desolated environment.

The forbidden truth is that we are living by a set of lies which are necessary for short-term profit, at the expense of human physical and psychological life and global environmental integrity. We are living in a system where power ensures that the requirements of profit take priority over the requirements of living things-including the need to know that this is the case. Consequently our freedom extends as far as, and no further than, the satisfaction of these requirements, with all else being declared neurosis, paranoia, communism, extremism, the work of the devil, or Neptunian nonsense.

Hate can only exist in the absence of understanding; where understanding is present, hate cannot exist. ... Very often hate is the result of a determination not to understand, and this is why hate is so dangerous: it actually resists understanding.

So don't ask yourself what people want. Ask instead, What is true? What really inspires me, excites me? What will really help people and take away their confusion and suffering? It's sort of a funny, crazy way to go, but I think it's the only way to bring water to the wasteland Joseph Campbell described. When I read something truthful, something real, I breathe a deep sigh and say, "Fantastic - I wasn't mad or alone in thinking that, after all!" So often we are left to our own devices, struggling in the dark with this external and internal propaganda system. At that point, for someone to tell us the truth is a gift. In a world where people all around us are lying and confusing us, to be honest is a great kindness.